Anton McNulty
antonmcnulty@mayonews.ie
In what is predicted to be the busiest ever summer for Ireland West Airport Knock there was further good news with the announcement of the creation of 40 new jobs.
Last week, the inaugural flights from Barcelona, Paris and Frankfurt arrived in Knock airport with new Ryanair services expected to bring over 30,000 new tourists to the region. Minister of State for Tourism, Michael Ring was on hand to welcome the new visitors with the new services expected to generate an associated tourism spend of over €23m for the local economy.
It was a busy day all round at the airport as the summer 2012 schedule commenced with the launch of additional flights to Faro-Algarve, Alicante and Gran Canaria with Ryanair and a new three times weekly service to Leeds-Bradford with Flybe.
The region’s connectivity with mainland Europe will be further enhanced in May when Europe’s largest airline, Lufthansa, commence a new weekly service to Dusseldorf in Germany. Connecting services to the German cities of Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich will also be available for booking as part of this new service.
In total there will be over 28 international destinations served from the airport this summer with over 150 weekly low fare flights available to and from destinations in the UK and Europe. The airport expects to have its busiest year in 2012 with over 710,000 passengers passing through it.
As a result of the increased traffic through the airport this summer, 40 new jobs will be created across a range of departments such as security, operations and customer services.
“With our new summer schedule now in place we are looking forward to our busiest ever summer at the airport,” said Joe Gilmore, Managing Director of IWAK. “We hope these new services will attract the full support of all in the region as they will require even greater effort on all our behalf to ensure they are a success and are maintained for the longer term.”
The new Ryanair services will deliver airline capacity in the region of 100,000 inbound and outbound seats providing low cost direct European tourists to the west of Ireland. Michael O’Leary of Ryanair welcomed the new routes which increased their service from Knock to 14 destinations.
Mayo Fine Gael TD, John O’Mahony, has welcomed the announcement of the creation of forty new jobs and paid tribute to the management and staff at the airport.
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